Verdict Of The Court In Telegram Token Sale Case Delayed

On February 19, 2020, the SEC and Telegram met in a court in the Southern District of New York State. The court ordered in the Telegram case to extend the preliminary injunction on the GRAM tokens sale. The exact terms will be announced later. The ban on selling GRAM is currently in effect.

At the hearing, the SEC lawyer insisted that the GRAM token should be considered a security, and the Telegram lawyer stated that the token should be considered a cryptocurrency.

It is worth recalling that in October 2019, the SEC filed a lawsuit against Telegram for selling tokens to investors that were not registered with the Commission as securities; as a result of the tokensale TON project attracted $1.7 billion of investments. SEC lawyer claims that legal violations consisted in the fact that the sale of tokens was not done in accordance with RegD standards.

In its turn, Telegram considers GRAM tokens a cryptocurrency, not a security, therefore, the company did not violate the RegD securities’ standards. As known, Pavel DUROV subsequently offered to return the money to investors, but they refused and decided to wait for the launch of the blockchain platform. As a result of the lawsuit, the launch of the TON platform was postponed to spring.

In October, the court ordered a preliminary injunction on the token sale. Telegram now agrees to fulfill all conditions to investors by April 30, but the reserved judgment on the preliminary injunction is still in effect. The court assured Telegram’s lawyer there would be a judgment in the case up to the stated time.

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